1. Field
Embodiments of the invention generally relate to acquiring tax data for a taxpayer as part of the process of preparing and filing a tax return with a government tax authority and, more particularly, to using information gathered from prior tax returns, imported tax forms, and unstructured data associated with the user to determine portions of a tax interview relevant to the taxpayer's tax circumstances and present only those relevant portions of the tax interview to the user without presenting the full tax interview.
2. Related Art
Traditionally, preparing a tax return by or on behalf of a taxpayer has been a laborious task. Because the same basic return (with minor variations) serves for all taxpayers, it must necessarily be comprehensive to address the various sources of income, deductions, and credits that any taxpayer might claim. To reduce the complexity and burden of preparing an individual tax return, tax-preparation services such as H&R Block® provide a tax interview at the beginning of the process of preparing the return so that categories of questions and entries that are not relevant to the individual taxpayer can be omitted. However, even with such a tax interview, the process of preparing a return remains burdensome, and abbreviating a tax interview too far runs the risk that one or more relevant categories of questions will be skipped, either due to the taxpayer misunderstanding the interview question, or forgetting one or more items of tax data that could make it relevant to them. Such an omission could lead to an overpayment of taxes, or an underpayment (resulting in back taxes and penalties when the error is discovered). Accordingly, there is a need for a simplified tax interview process that determines which questions are relevant to a particular return and presents only those questions to the preparer without presenting the full tax interview.